Is a soul nothing more than a conscience?
If it were your sacred calling to slay vampires, you wouldn’t want to believe they were human in any way, would you? Of course not. And, if you’re making a show with a heroine who is a vampire slayer, you don’t want her to be morally condemned as a killer. Maybe another slayer can cross the line, kill a human being and turn evil (at least temporarily), but only as a contrast to the heroine, who remains outside that little club of killers. Or, at least so she believes....
At the beginning of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we were told a vampire is not the human being who once wore that body, but is only the demon that killed the human.
Killing vampires, even those who had been friends as human beings, like Jesse or (later) Ford, was thus rendered morally acceptable in the Buffyverse.
But, what was the source of that information? Well, the Watchers’ Council, of course.
Since then we have learned that the Watchers’ Council is not always a reliable source of information. In fact, they have been known to misinform and manipulate both Watchers and Slayers. They have also proven they are willing to kill those who inconvenience them. Whistler, a demon, was far more helpful to Buffy in a time of crisis than any human being other than Giles and the “Scooby gang.”
When the Initiative insisted, throughout Buffy’s fourth season, that the demons and vampires they captured were “just animals,” it was made obvious to the audience they were wrong. Buffy taught Riley to recognize that reality was not as black-and-white as he believed. Through the demon-turned-human, Anya, and Giles’ experience as demon-for-a-day, we are learning that being a demon and being evil are not always the same thing.
Of course, on Angel we all learned that a half-demon could be a hero. One of the major themes of the past year, on both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, has been that demons are often, like Doyle, “more than meets the eye.”
So, what about vampires?
In the third-season episode "Dopplegangland" when Buffy tried to reassure Willow that a vampire is nothing like the original human, Angel began to explain, “Actually - “ but was interrupted. In the same episode, Willow could not bring herself to allow her vampire self from the alternate reality to be staked. Despite everything that she had been told, she felt instinctively that the vampire Willow was still Willow.
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